Breaking News…

In the Internet of Everything (IoE), immense amounts of data are being generated daily from smartphones, sensors, video cameras and other connected devices. Extracting their value and transforming them into actionable business strategies is a daunting challenge for data deluged customers. To make it easier for customers to achieve business outcomes, Cisco is today announcing it has established software resale agreements with Cloudera, Hortonworks® and MapR for their industry leading Apache™ Hadoop® Data Management capabilities and innovation.

A broad ecosystem of partners has been critical to Cisco’s success over the past 30 years. Data integration and management software partners Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR will continue to play a critical role in customer success in the big data and analytics market.

BARCELONA, SPAIN – March 3, 2015 – At Mobile World Congress 2015, Cisco announced that EE, the UK’s largest mobile network operator, is deploying Cisco small cells to support its growing base of enterprise customers. Cisco’s end-to-end small cell solutions will scale to be suitable for small, medium and large enterprise buildings.

Enterprises and their customers will benefit from a “five-bar” experience using standalone access points and a small cell solution that will support modules that plug into existing Cisco Wi-Fi access points. Installation is simple compared to traditional in-building systems, and cells will coordinate automatically to provide complete coverage that reaches every corner of the building. http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1600984

Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and Intel Announce Joint Startup Program

BARCELONA, Spain – March 3, 2015 – Today at Mobile World Congress, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and Intel announced Challenge Up!, a joint Internet of Things (IoT) accelerator for startups from the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. The program aims at helping innovative IoT startups go-to-market faster through joint projects, mentoring, high-value networking and corporate assets. Selected companies may also receive strategic investment and support commercializing their product or service for global markets.

Equinix – SDN engine for Cloud exchange

Equinix Programmable Network’s reliance on Netconf and Yang means it can use a transaction model for management, rather than older SNMP and CLI tools for managing switches. The endorsement from Equinix is a big deal for Cisco, which acquired Tail-f last year and has been working to convince network operators, as well as competitors who rely on the management software, that Cisco will keep Tail-f’s products vendor-neutral. Cisco made Tail-f’s ConfD network configuration tool free for a basic version late last month.

Equinix Cloud Exchange is an advanced interconnection solution that enables seamless, on-demand and direct access to multiple cloud services and networks across the globe. Equinix chose the Tail-f technology for its vendor neutrality, providing a single network-wide interface to all network devices, applications and services, as well as a common modeling language. This enables Equinix to provide multi-cloud services in an agile and vendor-agnostic way, simplifying and accelerating cloud access for the enterprise.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102466909

Lightreading / EANTC – NFV tests

Light Reading hooked up with independent test lab EANTC to see just how the world is changing for communications service providers (if at all). Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) was confident enough to let a team from European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) into its facilities in San Jose, Calif. and, in essence, behave like a CSP that wanted to test, evaluate and validate New IP functions that can potentially transform communications application creation and delivery processes.

Cisco Connected Justice™: Benefits of the Internet of Everything for Law

Enforcement, Courts and Corrections

The convergence of mobility, big data analytics and cloud is revolutionizing IT. It is uniting applications, systems and processes in ways that will be impacting you for years to come. Convergence is also at the heart of the Internet of Everything (IoE) that is connecting people, process, data and things anytime, anywhere. For law enforcement, courts and corrections the IoE can speed the pace of justice by providing real-time collaboration that streamlines processes. It can reduce processing times for inmates while improving safety for justice workers. Plus it can reach beyond the walls of justice facilities to empower remote adjudication and inmate services that reduce travel and improve citizen experiences.

KEYNOTE Live Stream – For Customers not attending in person The keynote will be live streamed for customers not attending Enterprise Connect 2015 in person. Can’t make it live to the keynote, then watch the live stream via the Collaboration Community. Register now.

Techhuddle – June 2015 Connecting to Network in a Mobile World

TechHuddle is your quarterly technical update including both live events around the UK&I and webinars. The events are an interactive mix of essential tech updates and live demos where you will be able to share your own experiences, opinions and challenges and get the same from your peers.

With an explosion of things being connected to the Network it is critical the Network (WLAN, LAN and WAN ) has the correct innovation needed to support the increasing demands from your business. The TechHuddle will take you on a journey from where you connect to the network describing the latest in Cisco wireless, switching and routing innovations that allow IT to reduce complexity and cost while still delivering business services at the speed your business requires.

The three sessions throughout the morning will cover 801.11ac, HDX, CMX, Analytics, Halo, Cisco Instant Access, Converged Access, MGig and CIsco IWAN and describe how these innovations form the fabric of the network providing agility, performance and scale in this new mobile world.

Take a look inside Cisco IT and join us for technical sessions, panel discussions and global webinars. Our IT experts share their insight, technical acumen and first hand experiences deploying and using Cisco products that yield tangible business benefits. You can also find Cisco IT subject matter experts at

TechWiseTV examines the technology driving IT strategy and decision-making. Join hosts Robb Boyd, Jimmy Ray Purser, and their guests in these informative and entertaining videos and online workshops.

Blogs

Paradox of the Internet at Royal Institute – Turing Lecture

Dr. Pepper, VP, Global Policy at Cisco recounted the early days of Internet (including a Jon Postel photo next to a whiteboard of DNS early domain architectures) and an intellectual comparison of the old PSTN days of control metrics (call length, distance) versus the openness of the Internet as we know it today.

The “Paradox theme” of the lecture refers to the threat to the current Internet wide Eco-system of academia, businesses, vendors, service providers, governments utilizing a de-centralized open distributed system and the threat of more legislation through government lobbying for a lot more “command and control” of the Internet due to concerns on security and safety.

An interesting view on open policy and the history and efforts of a global community to maintain that openness of contributions, you can watch and listen to the recorded session here

Secure Enterprise Network News

Cisco Catalyst 3560-CX & 2960-CX Series Switches

Cisco are excited to announce the General Orderability and FCS of the Cisco Catalyst 3560-CX and 2960- CX Series compact switches. The new compact switches extend your Catalyst switching infrastructure outside the wiring closet to build new workspaces (Youtube Video). They deliver advanced networking services, increased scalability, management simplicity and secure access.

Key highlights include:

 First in the industry with 240W PoE+ in a fanless switch model with silent operation

The compact switches give you the freedom to connect devices anywhere and provide unparalleled flexibility in mounting, orientation, powering and networking connectivity for easier deployment and simpler cable management across many industries including cruise ships, conventions, hotels, retail, education, healthcare and various other applications in the enterprise and IoT

Cisco founded the NBASE-T Alliance in October 2014 to promote solutions for more speed over installed Category 5e and 6 cables. Now we are introducing innovations that include NBASE-T technology and more across the entire breadth of our Cisco Catalyst portfolio–from compact switches to the backbone.

NBASE-T™ is a proven technology boosting the speed of twisted pair copper cabling up to 100 meters in length well beyond the designed limits of 1 Gbps. Capable of reaching 2.5 and 5 Gigabits per second over

100m of Cat 5e cable, the disruptive NBASE-T solution allows a new type of signaling over twisted-pair cabling. Should the silicon have the capability, auto-negotiation can allow the NBASE-T solution to accurately select the best speed: 100 Megabit Ethernet (100MbE), 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet (2.5GbE) and 5 Gigabit Ethernet (5GbE).

The migration to faster wireless access network speeds is essential to help enterprises keep pace with explosive growth in smart phones, tablets, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) access, Internet-of-Things (IoT), improved QoS, 4k HD video, teleconferencing, and simultaneous support of multiple users. Adoption of these technologies will be propelled by the upgrade of the wired-network infrastructure, as highlighted with some typical examples of NBASE-T deployments:

Cisco will release NBase-T products around May 2015, under the multigig name. It will be included on select models of Catalyst 3850, Catalyst 3560-CX and new linecards for the Catalyst 4500 modular switch.

New Threat Intelligence and Trend Analysis

Despite advances by the security industry, criminals continue to evolve their approaches to break through security defences. Attackers are realizing that bigger and bolder is not always better. The Cisco

The Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report highlights many creative techniques that attackers are exploiting to conceal malicious activity, often taking advantage of gaps in security programs. They are continually refining and developing new techniques to gain a foothold in environments and, increasingly, they are relying on users and IT teams as enablers of attacks to persistently infect and hide in plain sight on machines.

According to studies by Cisco, 75 percent of all attacks take only minutes to begin data exfiltration but take much longer to detect. These numbers are consistent with other studies as well as information being released related to recent high-profile data breaches. Response strategy needs to equip and empower responders with the tools and methods to:

Understand the nature of the event or incident

Evaluate the significance and urgency

Determine appropriate or acceptable outcomes

Implement necessary measures to achieve objectives

Evaluate the effectiveness of the response and refine as necessary

Engage internal and external resources to provide an efficient and effective reaction

Cisco IT and the Identity Services Engine – A multiyear deployment journey

The Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE), a policy engine, enables contextual network access control across wired and wireless networks, and extends to mobile connectivity as well (Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD). Contextual controls are based on multiple variables, including who (user identity), when (time of day), where (location), how (access method), and what (device). ISE works with our existing infrastructure to enforce security policy on all devices that attempt to gain access to the network. To do this, ISE can use access switches, wireless controllers, and most Cisco network gear for edge authentication, as device profiling sensors, and as access enforcement points.

Cisco IT was an early adopter of ISE (deploying ISE 1.1 in 2012), and have made much progress rolling out ISE capabilities in the last year and a half. See End-to-End Security Policy Control to learn about Cisco’s decision-making during the initial deployment phase. That deployment strategy held throughout Cisco’s fiscal-year 2014, which ran from August 2013 to July 2014. The article focuses on key areas of our current ISE deployments, including Deployment Strategy, Testing and Certification Process, Guest Networking and Enhancements, Profiling, Wireless Authentication, Wired Authentication, Replication and Scaling, Operational Support, Pilot and Limited Deployments, and Challenges/Lessons Learned.

The Industrialization of Hacking – How we got here and what to do to ensure the future of cybersecurity.

January 20 , 2015 By Martin Roesch

The evolving trends of mobility, cloud computing, and the Internet of Everything (IoE) present unparalleled opportunities for businesses, consumers, and hackers alike. Modern networks go beyond traditional walls and include datacenters, endpoints, virtual, mobile, and the cloud. These networks and their components constantly evolve and spawn new attack vectors including: mobile devices, web- enabled and mobile applications, hypervisors, social media, browsers, smart appliances, and even vehicles.

Federal agencies and private monitoring companies agree that cyber-attacks today are more frequent and more destructive. It’s no longer a matter of if these attacks will happen, but when and for how long. Cisco reports stopping an average of 320 million cyber-attacks each day. Or more than 3,700 attacks every second. Cisco also finds that 75 percent of all attacks take only minutes to begin data exfiltration but take much longer to detect. More than half of all attacks persist for months—even years—before they are discovered. And it can take weeks or months for a security breach to be fully contained and remediated.

The Industrialization of Hacking is not about to slow down. As the IoE continues to expand, Cisco estimates as many as 50 billion devices will be connected to the network by the end of the decade. In this brave new world of ubiquitous connectivity, information security is foundational to enabling organizations to achieve maximum value from these connections and must be a top priority. Small wonder Gartner Group predicts a surge in worldwide information security spending, from US$62 billion in 2012 to US$86 billion by 2016.

How Wi-Fi is Changing the Way We Work

The explosive growth of connected mobile devices is in no way slowing down, and neither are the network speeds users will demand to support these devices. In recent years, the conversation around mobility and the workplace has revolved around the influx of smartphones and tablets and an organization’s ability to support employee-owned devices to enable a new way of working. However, with the new wave of high-speed mobile devices coming quickly online and into workplaces, a new mobile transition is taking place wherein each employee averages several mobile devices. Wearable devices will continue to drive this trend, with the number of wearables expected to grow from 109 million in 2014 to 578 million in 2019.

See Also: Wearable Tech Startups Target the Enterprise

The move to the next phase of Wi-Fi (802.11ac Wave 2) is expected to increase wireless speeds by up to 10x more than

802.11n, which greatly benefits users who rely on smart devices and wearables at work. A better built Wi-Fi network offering faster wireless speeds will drive change in the workplace by ensuring that multitasking employees will have a better end-user experience and are able to utilize their devices, from the smartphone and tablet to the wearable.

Employees can and will take advantage of a Wi-Fi network with greater speeds and higher bandwidth, particularly a Wi-Fi network capable of providing the speeds promised by .11ac Wave 2 and the future 802.11ax, by bringing an increasing number of connected devices online.

As we look at this next mobile transition making its way into the workplace, 802.11ac Wave 2 offers tremendous opportunities (as well as some challenges)

Cisco is already addressing) to support a connected workforce that is persistently pushing to change the way we work with technology, one device at a time.

Cisco announced commercial availability of its Universal Small Cell (USC) 8000 Series designed for large enterprises and venues. This solution is the result of a strategic collaboration between Cisco and SpiderCloud Wireless, and will be offered to Cisco’s enterprise customers and channel partners. The global agreement includes Cisco reselling SpiderCloud’s entire small cell portfolio under the USC 8000

Series brand. In addition, SpiderCloud will develop custom small cell technology for Cisco. Vodafone will be the first service provider to deliver the mobile service to its enterprise customers.

The USC 8000 Series comprises several key advances that propel in-building mobile service from a niche fix to a mainstream business enabler, when delivered as part of the Cisco USC:

 Fast, Cost-effective Installation That Scales to Any Enterprise Building:

The Cisco USC 8088 Controller provides real-time coordination and distributed SON capability for up to 100 LTE/3G access points, enough to effectively cover the largest buildings.

 Integration with Deployed Wi-Fi Infrastructure:

The Cisco USC 8000 Series access points are available as standalone units or as plug-in modules for the Cisco Aironet 3600/3700 Wi-Fi access points – the most popular enterprise Wi-Fi in the world.

Cisco Policy Suite coordinates both cellular and Wi-Fi traffic, to switch traffic according to network performance or user profile. It also provides a platform for analytics to provide operational insights or to monetize customer experiences.

Cisco Wireless Useful Links

 Cisco Wireless Best Practices Adoption (Video)

This Video shows 4 best ways of implementing Wireless Best Practices. It covers the “Mobility Express

Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) enables businesses to deliver an uncompromised experience over any connection. Now IT organizations can right-size their branch-office connections using less-expensive WAN transport options without affecting performance, security, or reliability. With Cisco IWAN, traffic is dynamically routed based on application, endpoint, and network conditions to deliver the best -quality experience. The realized savings from IWAN not only pays for the infrastructure upgrades, but also frees resources for business innovation.

About the IWAN CPOC – 1 day Session : Cisco are pleased to announce that we are offering an IWAN Pre-Built Static Testbed, available in our CPOC lab in RTP, (or via Telepresence) which is designed to help our customers solidify their understanding of the IWAN architecture. It’s a one-day session and provides customers with hands-on experience of the various components and pillars of IWAN. Some of the test scenario’s you’d work through, with support from our dedicated CPOC team, include:

 Dynamic Multipoint VPN (DMVPN)

 Front door VRFs

 Dual connected spokes (MPLS & Internet)

 Direct and central Internet access

 PfRv3 Ease of Deployment and Manageability

 Varying traffic classes

 Reaction to traffic impairment

 AppNav-XE

 Legacy WAAS, vWAAS, ISR-WAAS

 Prime Infrastructure Management

Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.2 Now Orderable

Simpler, Faster IT from the Branch to the Data Center with One Management. Change is the new normal. You need a simpler and more efficient solution to manage the network, so that you can respond to the challenges of higher service levels, assured application delivery, and outstanding end- user experiences, while maintaining business continuity and controlling operational expenses. That solution is Cisco Prime™ Infrastructure.

Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.2 offers the following new capabilities:

 Data Center Management: Offers management and 360-degree views of Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) Series B Blade Servers and Series C Rack Servers, as well as support for the Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series Switches.

Collaboration News

No more complicated technology with Cisco Collaboration Meeting Rooms (CMR) Cloud, which combines Cisco WebEx personal rooms with cloud-based WebEx video bridge technologies, doctors and researchers no longer have to struggle with a complicated mix of technology. It’s simply better By easily setting up meetings in their own meeting rooms and joining using any device, doctors and researchers can now effectively collaborate via diverse video systems and share documents. Less travel time by both doctors and IT staff to offsite meetings translates into better care for patients and quicker advances in cancer research.

HR benefits

With CMR Cloud, human resources staff can now conduct video interviews without annoying delays and glitches. They can better determine whether candidates are a good fit for Moffitt, and, in turn, candidates get a better impression of their potential employer.

IT saves time and money Moffitt’s IT team can use its existing infrastructure. It doesn’t need to spend a large capital outlay to outfit a room for 50 participants because it’s a cloud service. To date 200 Moffitt staff have joined a single session, but there’s the capacity to fit more. And instead of spending 60 minutes setting up a video call, they can now do the same thing in 10 minutes or less. “I don’t troubleshoot this stuff anymore,” says Maass. “I love that. It really frees up my time to focus on more important business priorities.”

To find out more about Cisco CMR Cloud www.cisco.com/go/cmrcloud

Now Available: Cisco UC Integration™ for Microsoft Lync 10.6

Cisco UC Integration™ for Microsoft Lync 10.6 is now available for first customer shipment (FCS) . Cisco UC Integration™ for Microsoft Lync is a desktop integration that provides access to Cisco Unified Communications from Microsoft Lync. The solution extends the presence and instant messaging capabilities of Microsoft Lync 2010 or Microsoft Lync 2013 by providing access to a broad set of Cisco Unified Communications capabilities, including softphone standards-based video, unified messaging, audio and video conferencing, desk-phone control, and phone presence.

Cisco UC Integration™ for Microsoft Lync is tightly integrated with Microsoft Lync to deliver a consistent and compelling user experience while providing the benefits of increased employee productivity, reduced infrastructure complexity and a lower total cost of ownership. Cisco UC Integration for Microsoft Lync, version 10.6, brings new telephony capabilities from the most recent versions of Jabber for Windows. This new release will ensure customer satisfaction whilst Cisco continues to ensure that Cisco Collaboration Solutions can outshine and replace Lync in the customer’s infrastructure.

For more information, please visit

 Cisco UC Integration™ for Microsoft Lync on Cisco.com

 Software Download, Technical Documentation & Release Notes

Cisco WebEx Meetings for iPad & iPhone version 7.0 and Cisco WebEx

Meetings for Android 7.0 are available now!

We are pleased to share with you the newest versions of Cisco WebEx Meetings for iPad & iPhone and Android! Now you can join WebEx Event Center sessions from your iPhone or iPad and we’ve made it easy to start or join a Collaboration Meeting Rooms Cloud meeting directly from your Android device. Your Personal Rooms are also now supported on both Android and iPhone and iPad.

You can download the latest apps at your favorite app store or learn more here.

 Support for WebEx Event Center – The WebEx iOS client joins the Android client in enabling people to participate in WebEx Event Center meetings as a panelist or attendee (Requires WBS 29.8 or later).

Data Centre News

Nexus 3548-X Now Orderable

Cisco are happy to announce the orderability of Nexus 3548-X and 3524-X switches, the newest members in the Nexus family of data center switches. N3500 series switches are the industry leaders in ultra low latency switching. The 3548-X and 3524-X switches enhance the portfolio by adding Multicast NAT and Latency Monitoring* functionality.

Get wire-rate, layer 2 and layer 3 switching with a comprehensive feature set, including Cisco Algo Boost technology, with the lowest latency in the industry. The Cisco Nexus 3548/3548-X Switch, part of the Unified Fabric Family, is well suited for mainstream top-of-rack, (ToR) data center deployments.

Cisco UCS Director Express for Big Data accelerates the time to value for customers deploying Hadoop with a single touch policy driven deployment model and unified management of Hadoop clusters. By reducing the deployment complexity and simplifying the management of Hadoop clusters, it mitigates the operational challenges, reduces risk and lowers the costs associated with manual management of these environments. Cisco UCS Director Express for Big Data is also integrated with major Hadoop distributions – Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR, providing a unified management solution for both physical infrastructure and Hadoop services.

Cisco is excited to announce the general availability of Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Release 1.0(3f), and Cisco NX-OS Release 11.0(3f) for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series ACI-Mode Switches. This release adds 1RU TOR support to ACI and adds the capability to create a stretched fabric with ACI. With stretched fabric customers will now have the capability to create a fabric where leafs and spine could be installed in different locations. This release enables the following ACI capabilities :

Stretched Fabric – This feature allows for each leaf and all spines that participate in creating a fabric to be located up to 30 KMs apart and removes the restriction for every leaf to be connected to all spines. Please refer the following white paper for more details.

Cisco is excited to announce the general availability of Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Release 1.0(3f), and Cisco NX-OS Release 11.0(3f) for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series ACI-Mode Switches. This release adds 1RU TOR support to ACI and adds the capability to create a stretched fabric with ACI. With stretched fabric customers will now have the capability to create a fabric where leafs and spine could be installed in different locations. This release enables the following ACI capabilities:

Stretched Fabric – This feature allows for each leaf and all spines that participate in creating a fabric to be located up to 30 KMs apart and removes the restriction for every leaf to be connected to all spines.

Cisco Accelerates Greater Adoption of Network Programmability

Cisco recently announced the contribution of Basic ConfD, a free version of its powerful ConfD management agent software, to accelerate the adoption of programmability for the broader networking industry. Tail-f, now part of Cisco, provides two products, ConfD and NCS.

NCS, a multi-vendor network service orchestrator for traditional and virtualized networks is transitioning to the Cisco portfolio and will be marketed under the name Cisco Network Service Orchestrator enabled by Tail-f.

By implementing an end-to-end programmable network based on open standards, service providers can reduce configuration and management costs by nearly 50 percent over a five-year period, while having the agility to easily add new services. Today’s announcement about the future of Tail-f ConfD, demonstrates Cisco’s commitment to advancing open standards in the best interest of the networking industry.

ConfD is a mature, proven management agent framework with a rich set of APIs for developers of physical and virtual networking devices. Currently in use by more than 75 network equipment providers, ConfD provides the industry-leading implementation of the NETCONF protocol driven by the YANG data modeling language. The no-cost Basic ConfD is feature-rich and will be available for production use without additional fees for NETCONF. The premium version of ConfD, including a complete set of north – bound interfaces including CLI, REST and SNMP, continues to be commercially available.

Basic ConfD is available now and can be downloaded from the Tail-f website. The software is made available with an unlimited, perpetual license.

 Blog Post

 ConfD product page

 ConfD video

 Follow us on our LinkedIn page for targeted updates and announcements

 For more information about Cisco’s service provider news and activities visit the SP360 Blog or follow us on Twitter @CiscoSP360

The BranchPod is a converged compute, networking, and storage reference architecture developed jointly by Cisco and StorMagic, specifically designed to meet the needs of the lean branch office and multi-site environments, where not all the critical applications can be centralized due to, unreliable networks (bandwidth, latency), network availability, compliance (HIPPA, PCI, etc.) or legacy applications that cannot be centralized or were not designed to run over a WAN or in the cloud.

www.cisco.com/go/ucs

Cisco UCS E-Series Servers are virtualization-ready, high- density, single-socket blade servers designed to balance simplicity, performance, and application density while operating in an energy-efficient environment. These powerful, small form factor, x86 64-bit blade servers are housed within Cisco Integrated Services Routers Generation 2 (ISR G2) networking platforms and are designed to host essential infrastructure services and mission-critical business applications in the distributed enterprise

The last date that Cisco Engineering may release any final software maintenance releases or bug fixes is August 30, 2016. After this date, Cisco Engineering will no longer develop, repair, maintain, or test the product software. Customers are encouraged to migrate to the Cisco FireSIGHT Management Center

As originally announced on 30th April 2014 the long lived train of NX-OS 5.2 is approaching in the next 6 months the last date that Cisco Engineering may release any final software maintenance releases or bug fixes. After this date, 29th October 2015, Cisco Engineering will no longer develop, repair, maintain, or test the product software.